Cardiff School of Social Sciences

Funded Research Projects

• "Gender theories and risk perception: A secondary analysis" 2006-7 
• (with Prof. Nick Pidgeon UEA and Prof. Alan Urwin, University of Liverpool); Economic and Social Research Council (Science in Society Programme)
• A longstanding quantitative finding common to many surveys of public risk perceptions is that women respondents typically report higher levels of concern about environmental and technological hazards compared to men. Although recent research now indicates that this empirical relationship may be more complex than first thought, the current literature fails to offer adequate explanations for the observed relationships between gender and risk perceptions. The research addresses this deficit of theory through a multi-level investigation and critical synthesis of the ways in which contemporary gender theory, drawn from social psychology and science and technology studies in particular, might account for the observed empirical findings on gender and risk. Methods used are a desk study and a secondary qualitative analysis of existing focus group data sets (total = 28 groups) of women and men talking about risk, technology and science. Based upon its resulting theoretical synthesis, the project will point to new directions for science communication and engagement policy.

• "Socio-technical risk, decisions and values: A narrative approach" 2003-2008 
• (with Prof. Nick Pidgeon & Peter Simmons, Environmental Sciences, UEA); Economic and Social Research Council (Risk in Social Contexts Priority Network)
• This project emerged out of a desire to develop innovative methodological and conceptual approaches to understanding experiences of environmental risk in everyday lives. A current challenge in risk research is to develop methods to understand and represent the complex production of values, by publics and stakeholders, in the process of working through decisions around living with and managing risk. Taking a narrative approach, the project is exploring values through the stories that people tell about living with risk. In the context of this project, environment is taken to include 'the vulnerable world of everyday life', thus expanding the definition to include the home and the workplace. The project focuses upon two contrasting case studies of communities living with sources of significant socio-technical risk to their environments. One involves a nuclear power station and the other a transport-related source of risk, both issues that are the subject of intense policy interest and debate.

• "Changing Lives and Times: A Qualitative Longitudinal Network" 2007-2012 
• Coordinator Dr Bren Neale, School of Sociology and Social Policy, University of Leeds"; Economic and Social Research Council
• Changing Lives and Times: Relationships and Identities through the Life course (shorthand title: 'Timescapes') is a large scale, qualitative longitudinal study, set in the UK, that follows people over time to explore the ways in which their personal relationships and identities unfold over the life course. The study will investigate how fundamentally important relationships with significant others - parents, siblings, wider family, children, partners, friends and lovers — are implicated in the way individuals define themselves, and impact upon their life chances and life decisions. It will also seek to understand the significance of time in people's lives by focussing upon three 'timescapes' : biographical time, seen as an individual life that flows through the life span from birth to death; generational time, which links people in particular emotional and practical ways with their own generation and those of their parents and children over the course of their lives; and historical time, the way people locate themselves in different epochs and in relation to different external events, circumstances and environments, both locally and globally. Seven empirical projects will collectively span the life course, documenting the personal lives and relationships of children and young people, adults in midlife, and those in later life. The projects are located in diverse geographical and cultural settings throughout England, Wales and Scotland.
• The set of empirical projects will feed into three central strands of work. In strand one, the data will be drawn together to create a rich working archive on personal lives and relationships at the turn of the Millennium. Strand 2 will foster and showcase the re-use of the data set, within and beyond the academic community, through a range of activities, including studentships and mobile workshops. In Strand 3 we will organise knowledge sharing activities and events at local, national and international levels (regular workshops and conferences, interactive website, advisory groups and networks, publications) through which we will report on the findings of the study, highlight its relevance for policy and practice, and advance knowledge and understanding of the methods of qualitative longitudinal research.

• Cardiff Based Empirical Project: Masculinities, Identities and Risk: Transition in the lives of men and fathers
• This project will draw on and extend a previous study exploring the ways in which men narrate, and account for, their experiences of becoming a father for the first time, and any transformations it brings to their relationships and lives (Henwood and Procter, 2003). Based on three waves of interviews (conducted before and after the birth), the project has generated a carefully crafted, qualitative longitudinal data set focused intensively around some critical turning points in men’s life histories (pregnancy, birth, changes to daily routines) and how they interpret or make meaning of a significant biographical change. Use of diverse cultural representations of men and fathers as prompts within the interviews provides a valuable historical contextualization of the biographical data. The project will conduct a substantively and methodologically innovative meta- and re-analysis of waves 1-3 of the men’s transition to fatherhood data. This will enable a more finely grained understanding of temporalities in the experiences of fathers over a time of intensive change in their lives. The empirical re-study will provide a unique opportunity for a long term follow up of the sample, whose lives may have changed significantly since they were last interviewed nearly a decade ago, and for comparative investigations into two geographically, socially and culturally diverse cohorts of first time fathers. The project will be geared towards extending (‘scaling-up’) the reach, relevance and impact of studies of men’s sense-making and life transition within a range of academic/educational, policy and practice arenas, such as psycho-social, gender and life course studies; parenting education; gender, welfare and citizenship; counseling and mental health.

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• “Energy Biographies: Understanding the Dynamics of Energy Use for Energy Demand Reduction”  2011-2014 
• (led by Professor Karen Henwood, with Professor Nick Pidgeon, Dr Catherine Butler, Dr Karen Parkhill and Dr Fiona Shirani, Cardiff University) ESRC/EPSRC Energy and Communities Joint Venture
• www.energybiographies.org
• Concerns regarding climate change and the security of energy supplies mean that the transition to a secure, affordable and low carbon energy system has become a key objective of UK energy policy.  It is now widely accepted that to achieve this aim we need to focus not only on low carbon forms of energy production (e.g. through renewable technologies), but also innovative ways to reduce our consumption of energy - whether in the home, workplace or transportation. More